Recording - January 2012 - 35

a bit of top boost to the drums, but “I was always having [the Band’s drummer] Levon Helm thrown at me.” Levon’s drumkit, if Elliott Landy’s album photo is representative, was as spare as his drumming. Along with snare and kick, he was apparently using only a single floor tom; no rack toms. In the picture there’s only one cymbal, and no hi-hat. One Internet source reports that the drum tuning was unusual, too; Helm had tightened only a couple of lugs on the tom, leaving the rest slack, which produced an extremely-damped sound. (He would incorporate more toms on subsequent recordings; in fact, aural evidence suggests that while he used this minimal drumkit on much of the Brown Album, he augmented it on some cuts.) Given the un-hyped style of the album, it’s not surprising that the engineers chose unhyped mics for recording the drums. Again, if Landy’s album photo is any indication, all four mics on the kit were E-V RE15s: one pointed sideways at the snare’s shell, one on the cymbal, one on the floor tom, and one whose position is hard to determine (it’s out of sight behind the kick, probably miking the beater side). The recordings were made through an early Langevin transformer-coupled solid-state board onto an 8-track 1” recorder, in a house the group had rented from entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr.. The album was made quickly, but its influence would ripple through the music world for many years. Can you get close to this sound? RE15s are fairly common on ebay (I’ve bought several), though they probably won’t sound like they did when they were new. (A few in my collection actually sound better than the newest one, so this isn’t necessarily bad news, but it’s kind of a crapshoot.) Probably the most important thing to do, if you’re after the Brown Album sound, is to strip down the kit and do the unusual tuning thing on the tom. And lay off the ‘verb and eq. 1971—When the Levee Breaks Perhaps the most famous sound in modern rock drumming is the locomotive power of John Bonham’s playing on this track from Led Zeppelin IV. The circumstances of the recording were, um, a bit unusual. Engineer Andy Johns (Glyn is his brother) put Bonham and his kit (newly-purchased) at the bottom of an open stairwell in a British mansion built in 1795. He put a stereo pair of Beyerdynamic M160 ribbon microphones at the top of the stairwell; no word on exactly what type of stereo miking he used, but my guess would be X/Y or ORTF. (Unlike classic ribbon mics, the M160 has a hypercardioid pickup pattern.) He ran those mics through a Helios board in the Rolling Stones’ mobile truck parked outside, squashed the signal hard with a pair of (probably) UREI 1176 compressors, and for good measure ran the signal through a tape-echo unit borrowed from lead guitarist and producer Jimmy Page before finally putting it onto multitrack tape. (I suspect they printed it to the tape at a hot level, too.)

Could you replicate the sound? Well, if you have an open stairwell handy, in a building with lots of diffusion on the walls to break up standing waves and slap echoes, and the requisite gear, you could have fun giving it a try. If there are no English country houses in your neighborhood, you might try the aforementioned wooden church. The result of Johns and Bonham’s efforts? A sound like no other, ironically on an older song inspired by the terrible floods that devastated the Mississippi Delta in 1927, first recorded by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929. Back then, as mentiond earlier, they didn’t mike drums at all. Aftershocks With John Bonham’s pile-driver drumming, we wrap up this brief look at the history of drum recording. It’s been an interesting trip, and one theme that recurs is how often the classic drum sounds were recorded with dynamic or ribbon mics, rather than the now-ubiquitous condensers. I hope I’ve given you some ideas which will inspire you to experiment with older techniques. You won’t get the same results, of course, but... okay, let me tell you this story. A couple of years ago Elvis Costello was interviewed on Fresh Air, and he made one of the most thoughtful and insightful comments I’ve heard from a performing artist. He said (and I’m paraphrasing as well as I can), “When you start out, you’re an imitator; you try to sound like the Beatles, or Bob Dylan, or whoever it was who inspired you. And of course you don’t succeed, because you’re not Bob Dylan or the Beatles, you’re you. But in the process of failing to sound like somebody else, you develop what turns out to be your style.” And so it may be for recording drums. In this article, I’ve left a lot out, because I couldn’t find it. I haven’t (so far) discovered reliable information on how Sam Phillips recorded D. J. Fontana on the early Elvis recordings that include drums. And I’d love to know how the drums were recorded on early Rolling Stones records, particularly Between the Buttons. Recent (though much-disputed) reports that neutrinos may travel faster than light (and backwards in time) give me hope that someday I may know. Fire up the time viewer, Professor... Paul J. Stamler (stamler@recordingmag.com) is a recording engineer, audio electronics aficionado, and teacher of young impressionable minds at Webster University’s Department of Audio Aesthetics & Technology, located in St. Louis. References Brian Kehew & Kevin Ryan. Recording the Beatles. Curvebender Publishing, 2006. “An Afternoon with Bill Putnam.” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 37:9 (September 1989), 723–730.
RECORDING JANUARY 2012

Recording - January 2012

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